Was Stalin killed to avert war?

Terrified that Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin was about to launch a full-scale nuclear attack on the United States and a second mass-murder campaign causing tens of millions of deaths, his underlings secretly murdered him with rat poison, a major new historical study concludes.

When Stalin died on March 5, 1953, the official explanation was that he had suffered a brain hemorrhage shortly after a dinner with several senior Soviet officials, including Lavrenti Beria, head of the secret police.

The true cause of his death will likely never be proven, unless an autopsy is performed on his embalmed corpse. But the new study by Russian and U.S. historians argues that he appears to have ingested warfarin, a powerful and flavourless rat poison that thins the blood and causes strokes and hemorrhages.

"The circumstantial evidence is overwhelmingly in favour of non-fortuitous death," said Jonathan Brent, a professor of Russian history at Yale University. "And to support this further, we now have solid evidence, non-circumstantial evidence, of a cover-up at the highest level."

The study is likely to cause a controversy in Russia, where Stalin's legacy has deeply divided the public. Some, such as Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov, still call him a hero.

The view seems to have popular support: One opinion poll of the Russian public last week found 53 per cent described Stalin's historical role as "absolutely positive" or "more positive than negative," and only 33 per cent took a negative view.

Prof. Brent is also the director of the Yale University Press and the editor of a 25-volume series on the contents of the Soviet Union's secret archives. He conducted his study with Vladimir Naumov, a historian who works in Russia and specializes in Soviet records.

To be published next month under the title Stalin's Last Crime , the study shows that Beria and his colleagues were terrified of the dictator, who by 1953 had killed tens of millions and imprisoned countless more. It found that his dinner companions appear to have waited hours before calling for medical help, and that they altered his death records to make the event appear innocuous.

"All of the indications are that Stalin was intent on launching a massive purge of Soviet society. They all knew it," Prof. Brent said. This "second terror" would likely have killed tens of millions of Jews and other Russians, including many of Stalin's colleagues. Aside from fearing for their own lives, Prof. Brent said, the Soviets also feared that Stalin had become dangerous enough to destroy the world.

"It wasn't simply that they were afraid for their own lives, and they were, but it was . . . the fear of a larger nuclear holocaust that drove them."

The study includes new, documentary evidence that Stalin was attempting to fabricate enough evidence to accuse the United States of planning a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union. Among those who were aware of this plan, and feared its results, was Nikita Khrushchev, who succeeded Stalin.

Stalin himself said in public speeches at the time that there was a plot to assassinate him and other Soviet leaders, known as the doctors' plot because his initial accusations were directed at Jewish doctors. His version of the plot grew to incorporate most of the Soviet Jewish population and the leadership of the United States.

Two weeks before his death, Stalin had ordered the building of vast prison camps in remote Soviet regions, and many believed that he planned to launch a second campaign of terror against Jews.

As a result, Stalin's assassination conspiracy theory, as a justification for mass murder, may itself have led to his assassination.

"One of the most suggestive pieces of evidence we have is that Beria's first act, after being appointed head of the ministry of internal affairs after Stalin's death, was that he abolished the doctors' plot. Now, why would he make something like that his first act? The only explanation for that was that the doctors' plot represented a huge threat against the Soviet Union."

Prof. Brent's study includes a copy of Stalin's original death certificate, which shows he fell ill shortly after dinner on March 1, vomited blood that night and suffered a brain hemorrhage on the morning of March 2, shortly after doctors arrived. That copy of the certificate has never been seen or published before; the "official" death certificate shows him falling ill on the night of March 2, and doctors arriving shortly afterward.

The Jewish doctors were due to go on trial later in March of 1953, and construction of the camps was to begin shortly afterward. After Mr. Khrushchev took office, the trials were cancelled, the doctors exonerated, the camps were never built and nuclear tensions with the United States were reduced. According to Prof. Brent, the assassination likely saved tens of millions of lives.